Killer's abusive childhood cited in bid to save life

Thursday

Feb 14, 2013 at 12:01 AM

STOCKTON - Defense attorneys took the jury into the abusive childhood of convicted murderer John Joseph Lydon on Wednesday, recounting beatings by his parents and his sexual abuse by a Catholic priest, in an effort to save the defendant's life.

Jennie Rodriguez-Moore

STOCKTON - Defense attorneys took the jury into the abusive childhood of convicted murderer John Joseph Lydon on Wednesday, recounting beatings by his parents and his sexual abuse by a Catholic priest, in an effort to save the defendant's life.

Lydon, 39 and already a prisoner in the California prison system, faces the death penalty after being found guilty of killing his cellmate at Tracy's Deuel Vocational Institution in 2010. A death sentence would make him the first person in four years to be sent to death row from San Joaquin County.

Now that guilt has been established, defense attorney Deborah Fialkowski told jurors, "what you're going to be looking at is John as a person."

Jurors found him guilty of first-degree murder and, despite testimony of his psychological problems, determined he was sane.

Lydon, who has killed three times, has said he strangled cellmate Jonathan Guy Alexander at Deuel because he didn't want to be housed with a child molester. Alexander, a convicted child molester, was found strangled, his head covered with a sheet, under Lydon's bunk bed.

His previous cellmate killing was in Coalinga's Pleasant Valley Prison in 2004.

Lydon's troubled upbringing, Fialkowski said, is not an excuse but serves as an explanation for why he turned out the way he did.

The defense painted a picture of a boy beaten by his parents, once to the point of hospitalization, given up to child social services and sexually abused by a Catholic priest of a church where he was an altar boy.

"He always wanted to be with his mom, but his mom didn't want him there," longtime family friend Kathleen Summers said before tearing up on the stand.

Lydon's early childhood was spent in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester. A "lovely neighborhood" of mostly Irish Catholics, said Summers, who still lives in Dorchester.

Lydon's grandfather was a police officer, and so was a good portion of Dorchester's residents.

The defendant and his sister attended Catholic school, like most children there. But the neighborhood's appearance was a bleak contrast of the reality inside the family home.

Summers said Lydon's grandmother was an alcoholic, and his mother was controlling to the point the children had to ask permission to use the bathroom.

John's father, she said, also was an alcoholic. He was violent and many times cheated on his wife. "He was a horrific father," Summers said. "He just beat (Lydon) like he was a man."

The father introduced Lydon and his sister to alcohol and drugs, defense attorneys say.

In one of the beatings, she said, Lydon was about 7 years old when he was rushed to a hospital for a head injury that needed stitches.

In a culture in which people stayed out of others' personal business, Gallipo said she and her brother wouldn't dare tell others about the abuse for fear the beatings would get worse.

"Nobody wanted to hear the stories, anyway," she said.

Gallipo and Lydon were sent away to live with their father after their parents separated and their mother remarried, according to testimony.

Somehow, the children ended up in the care of social services, bouncing from foster homes to the homes of other relatives.

Summers said Lydon's mother spent money on herself and went on vacations with her new husband instead of trying to get her children back. "She loved her animals more than she loved her children," Summers said.

Summers thought back to when Lydon was an altar boy at St. Brendan's Church in Boston. Former Priest John Geoghan took special interest in Lydon, according to testimony.

Lydon would later reveal he was being sexually abused by Geoghan. "(Lydon) should have been able to tell his mother about Geoghan," Summers said. "He couldn't."

Years later, Geoghan was found guilty of molesting another boy and sentenced to prison. Geoghan was murdered behind bars.

According to the defense, the psychological damage Geoghan caused Lydon continues into his adult life and it explains his behavior toward pedophiles.

Lydon was already serving long consecutive sentences when he murdered Alexander at Deuel. He had been sentenced to 54 years to life for a fatal robbery in the Los Angeles area. And in 2004, while serving time for that crime at Coalinga's Pleasant Valley Prison, he killed a cellmate, also a convicted child molester. Lydon was sentenced to 15 years to life for that murder.